Quality assurance and enrichment of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies

• Published in: BMC medical informatics and decision making Vol. 20; no. Suppl 10; p. 301
• Main Authors: Agrawal, Ankur, Cui, Licong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central Ltd 15.12.2020; BioMed Central; BMC
• Subjects: Accuracy; Auditing; Biological Ontologies; Cancer; Computational linguistics; Controlled vocabularies; Cysts; Data dictionaries; Enrichment; Humans; Interoperability; Jargon; Language processing; Mapping; Medical care; Methods; Natural language interfaces; Ontology; Public health; Quality assurance; Quality control; Quality management; Semantic enrichment; Semantics; Social networks; Standardization; Subject specialists; Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; Taxonomy; Thesauri; Tumors; Unified Medical Language System; Vocabularies & taxonomies; Vocabulary, Controlled; Web portals; United States; Semantic enrichment; Quality assurance; Mapping; Ontology; Auditing
• ISSN: 1472-6947; 1472-6947
• DOI: 10.1186/s12911-020-01342-4

Biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies are used to organize and store various domain-specific knowledge to provide standardization of terminology usage and to improve interoperability. The growing number of such ontologies and terminologies and their increasing adoption in clinical, research and healthcare settings call for effective and efficient quality assurance and semantic enrichment techniques of these ontologies and terminologies. In this editorial, we provide an introductory summary of nine articles included in this supplement issue for quality assurance and enrichment of biological and biomedical ontologies and terminologies. The articles cover a range of standards including SNOMED CT, National Cancer Institute Thesaurus, Unified Medical Language System, North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and OBO Foundry Ontologies.